


intra tua vulnera

by garden of succulents (staranise)



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medieval, Angst, Crusades, M/M, Medieval England, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-26 15:26:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7579381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/garden%20of%20succulents
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>England, 1198.  Kent Parson comes home from Crusade with all the renown and royal favour his best friend missed out on by staying home.</p><p>On the other hand, Samwell's new Sheriff and England's foremost knight lost a few things by going away, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	intra tua vulnera

The first thing England’s foremost knight and newest sheriff did on leaving London was visit his sister’s abbey.  The letter he received from her in France had said Catherine was settled in the construction dust of her new home, the dormitories being completed but the hospital still underway, but when he arrived the building was splendid and new.  Only a few workers lingered, laying panels of lead onto the roof and putting shutters up over the broad arched windows.

She knew better than to dart in among the crowd of horses and donkeys, warhorses especially, but as soon as he passed his reins to a groom and walked towards her, the nun dropped her air of serenity and launched herself at him, squealing, “ _Kent!”_

He caught her, picked her up and spun her twice before he had to put her down again, blinking back tears.  She was so _old,_  so solid and heavy, so sure in herself and her movements.  He’d thought it wouldn’t hurt that she was so old, because she’d always been older than him; because she was twenty, a woman already, when he left.  But now when he looked in her face he didn’t see the children they once were; he saw their mother, a face he’d never see again.

When he set her down she laughed and curtseyed him mockingly, saying, “I forgot, Sir Vincent.  Le Victor, so I hear.”

He mimed striking her across the back of her shoulders.  “I never want to hear that name from your mouth,” he ordered.  Let the rest of England call him by his baptismal name like the French; from her, the sound of his childhood nickname was more precious than silver.

“Oh, Kenny,” she said, then became aware of the crowd behind him, which had achieved some form of order.  “Introduce me to your knights?”

They assembled Kent’s gaudy mob of foreign crusaders and the knights of his shire rich and fashionable enough to meet their new sheriff in London, instead of waiting for him to join them in the country.  All of whom greeted Catherine with enough reverent gentility that he breathed a little easier as she brought them inside to meet her Abbess and wash the dust from their hands and faces.  He wanted them to bring order to the abbey’s guest quarters, not chase it out.

“I’d feel more comfortable if I knew the knights nearby,” she said the next day, touring him through the hospital wing.  “What the Mother and I want for this part of the abbey is to be absolutely closed off to men–to be a refuge for women.  Healing and sanctuary for them.  But my last convent had so many problems with that–an angry husband comes and boxes the sister doorwarden’s head, so she’s obliged to shut the door, and then he hangs around threatening people who come in for sanctuary and keeping us from going out and doing their business in the town–it was such a help to have big strong men in chainmail to ride up on their horses and chase him off.  When you send people on foot with cudgels to do it, sometimes he’ll fight them, and once we had an awful debate whether to leave him bleeding on the doorstep or bring him in and care for him ourselves–but a knight on a horse, they’ll run right off.  And if I know more than _one_ knight, I could even give sanctuary to women of the nobility.  But they’re all such busy men, and…”

“England is filling with a tide of idle knights,” he said, and squeezed her hand.  “I’ll talk to them.”

Kent didn’t expect the hospital wing to be beautiful and gracious, airy and with finely-worked stone, but it was.  It was the material payment to save his soul from damnation, and men like him; when knights like him came back from Crusade, they confessed to sins so numerous that repenting of them would take a lifetime of prayer and fasting.  Some of them did, in fact, retire to monasteries and do just that.  The rest of them, prevented, by example, by the gift of royal offices that had to be performed, went back to their ordinary lives and gave their money to men and women who would pray and do good works on their behalf–who, in turn, built places to do that in.

He’d been expecting something that felt like the sins that funded it, like a crusader’s castle–squat and thick and dark, ugly-faced and utilitarian, quickly built, something that did what had to be done and didn’t think too hard about it.  The airiness, the sunlight streaming in from wide courtyard windows, the graceful high vaults of ceiling, were… overwhelming, when he thought of himself as having any part of their construction.

“Oh, what a cloud,” Catherine said, looking through an outer window.  “Horsemen, Kenny, don’t you think?”

He readily tore his eyes from the rest of the room and looked out with her.  The dust rising over the hill from the road looked like a group of ten or twenty horsemen, he thought, at least two abreast, riding at the trot and canter.  “I think they’re coming for me,” he sighed.  “I should go put on grander clothes and meet them.”

Kent understood the way this part of the world worked, and didn’t grudge it.  For Sir Vincent le Victor, whom enough people remembered as Vincent Parson for all that he was now the King’s Sheriff, the Abbess waited in her abbey and received at leisure.  For Sir Jacques de Sezanne, son of a baron the Sheriff oversaw, she waited in the courtyard as the horses churned up dust and the knights of Samwell dismounted.

Jack looked at her as he came forward, but Kent knew, his stomach dropping as Jack did, that Jack was kneeling to the man who stood beside her.  To Kent.  To whom he said, “My lord sheriff.”

 _No,_  Kent thought, appalled, and pasted on a smile as he reached out to pull Jack up and make him stand.  He’d been _told_  to fear disrespect from the barons, to be wary of a lack of courtesy and respect, but what bothered him more was this careful over-formality, this overt _submission._   The stiffness in Jack’s body and the distance in his eyes.  The sudden suspicion that the de Sezannes were going to very carefully hide any hint of resentment or actual feeling about Kent’s elevation, in a way that meant they resented it a great deal.

“My old friend,” he said, brightly and falsely, and kissed Jack in welcome.  “How good to see you.”

Then he stepped back, let Jack’s hands go, let him move on to the Abbess for the actual words of welcome.  In the courtyard, the Samwell knights were watching Jack carefully, and bowed to Kent with careful formality; he bowed back, feeling wrong-footed and confused, and followed Jack and the Abbess into the guest wing.  They followed him.

“One of my men injured his shoulder on the road this morning,” Jack was saying to the Abbess, as they went in to lunch.  “I think he should be seen to before he eats.”

“Sister Catherine,” the Abbess called, and gestured her over; the knight in question was not hard to miss, since two of his fellows had helped him off his horse, and were beside him now as he clutched his arm and looked sick with pain.  Kent reapplied his smile as his best prop disappeared, summoning another nun to come with her and bear the injured knight away; now when he sat down next to Jack at lunch, there was no one at the table at the side of the room to catch his eye, to exchange pained or knowing glances, to sympathize.  All Kent had to shore up against during the meal was the dubious comfort of Petar’s silent bulk, and the sight of his other men further down the hall, mixed with Jack’s knights.

“My parents bade me escort you to Sezanne Castle so they could welcome you properly,” Jack said, so politely and smoothly and devoid of inflection that he must have practiced it beforehand.

“How delightful,” Kent replied, and passed him the meat.


End file.
